The Global Age

by Wolf Schäfer

Five hundred years from now, historians may call
the long and eventful stretch of history since the
second world war of the 20th century the Global
Ages. They may use the plural to signify that they
see a sequence of different periods and eras in
the new historical epoch which was originally
named the Global Age.

This change from the singular to the plural has
happened before. The millennium from about 500 to
1500 A.D. was conceived first as a Middle Age in
Latin (medium aevum); it became the Middle Ages
only in the English-speaking countries after the
1840s, and it is still referred to in the singular
in the German, French, Italian, Spanish and
Portuguese languages. The Global Age of our time
may thus well turn into the Global Ages of later
times. In fact, we may already be in a position to
perceive the second half of the 20th century as a
distinct sub-era of the Global Age.

The Global Age was brought to life in the Cold War
period. In the last fifty years more than two
great powers and their allies were drawn into a
worldwide political, military, social, economic
and cultural struggle. The Cold War affected every
country, all cultures, and the whole physical
globe. Perhaps we know that too well. We are too
close to the numerous events of our recent past,
too familiar with the principal actors, too
impressed by this long-lived conflict and its
implosive end to see clearly the enduring new
order of our history. So we must ask ourselves:
What is the most important pattern of contemporary
historical change? To name the history we find
ourselves in, we must identify the leading
tendency of our time and prove that something has
come forcibly to the fore and is now irreversibly
under way.

The end of the Cold War did not terminate,
interrupt or slow down the processes of
globalization. Globalization bonds the bygone time
of the Cold War to the present time. Both times
are therefore but parts of one historical epoch,
the Global Age, which began its work around the
middle of the 20th century.

It is hardly surprising that the time after the
fall of the Soviet Union has yet to receive an
acceptable name. We cannot expect to find a proper
name for a time before this time has shown its
historical colors. True, even a very short time
can make a big difference, but the few years since
the final lowering of the Soviet flag in late
December 1991 are not in the class of momentous
years, like, for instance, the three years from
1789 to 1791, or from 1989 to 1991. However, the
uninterrupted thrust of globalizing events throws
the last three and the previous fifty years in the
epochal scales of our Global Age.

Even the post-modernists know by now that they
cannot define an age successfully by calling it
with negative post-this-or-that-names. If Modernity changed her name and all you hear is
that she is no longer Lady M, you do not know if she
is now Madam A, B, C or Z. Historians have time and again faced the double challenge of
periodization and wrestled with the thorny
question of how to cut the seamless garment of
history at the right time with the right name.
Finding the "right time" means to determine the
beginning and, if possible, the end of an age, and
finding the "right name" means to highlight what a
particular age is positively about. The tripartite
division of ancient, middle, and modern time, the
Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, the
Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, bear
witness to this risky, but unavoidable business of
making history intelligible.

Probably the best way to miss the main tendency of
our time and to trivialize the complexity of our
age, is to look for a dramatic single event, one
all-defining person, or a highly significant
thing. Naming the age after a new machine,
political figure, energy source, frontier, musical
style, and so forth, captures one aspect of it.
Yet our age has come up with many novelties, from
electronic computers to pop music, all of them
relevant. How could one item on our list supply us
with the right label for all items? It is
impossible, much too thin and reductionist an
approach. We have to look for a thicker
periodization, one that is capable of aggregating
important changes on the one hand, and of
accentuating the leading current and perpetrator
of lasting historical change on the other.

The second half of the 20th century has witnessed
the start of the Global Age, until recently
without much understanding. Older historical
trends have helped, but a new historical
configuration has materialized without a master
plan. A staggering multitude of interlocking and
mutually reinforcing changes has linked all local
histories. Global history today is no longer a
pipe dream of world historians, but a vigorous
reality in untold political, physical, social,
cultural, technical and economic ways, not all
pleasant. Nobody, however privileged or abused by
the Global Age, is just a local fellow anymore.
You may enjoy your immediate environment, or curse
it, but you cannot hope to detach it ever again
from the global streams that run through it with
power.

Everything in this massively interconnected world
happens simultaneously. Tourists and terrorists,
arms and drugs, artworks and consumer goods,
diseases, fashions and pollutants interact
boundlessly, travel across all borders and make
history in real time. The Global Age comes after
the Western Age of Modernity and is not
handicapped by the fact that the 20th century is
winding down. The Global Age is busy with
connecting all humans, nations, regions and
cultures in ever more densely intertwined loops;
it has no time for fin de siecle-weariness. The
Global Age reaches out into the next century and
beyond; it is preoccupied with its self-defining
task: to create a history - for the first time in
human history - that is shared by all current and
future human beings, animals and plants on the
third planet from the sun.

The making of the Global Age is a story that can
be written now and, indeed, is waiting to be
narrated. It is a history, however, that is not to be told in a Toynbeean or
Spenglerian grand narrative; we are no longer
operating within a single view of the world. Our
global history must be written as an open-ended
and decentered history from the various vantage
points of competing cultural perspectives, diverse
social locations and local spots in the global
matrix of terrestrial places. Writing global
history is a collective project for historians and
social scientists, including journalists. No
master narrative, but a commonly shared name for
our age should be in order.

Future historians of the Global Ages will dig up a
challenge of The New York Times, entitled "Name
That Era," and they will say: "Look how people who
had not had the same past realized in the 1990s
that they had entered the same present." Our
observers will note how many voices from all
around the globe began to agree in the last decade
of the 20th century that a Global Age had been
ushered in by a global technoscience, a global
economy, a global civilization and a global
environment. And they will carefully reconstruct
our imagined futures of the Global Age and
politely say: "Look how interesting and yet
how wrong."

Note: Sunday, March 19, 1995, The New York Times had asked its readers in its "Week in Review" section to pinpoint our era "on the map of history." The above was my response. The newspaper received a flood of answers, one reader sent 52. The New York Times commented: "hundreds of readers - professors, students, psychologists, bureaucrats and hackers - replied seriously. ... The responses came overwhelmingly from men and they were overwhelmingly pessimistic. The word 'global' appeared in more than 40 of the names; the prefixes 'dis-,' 're-,' 'post-,' 'fin de' and 'cyber-' (including two cyberias and one cy-barbaric) popped up repeatedly" (The New York Times, Sunday, April 2, 1995, "No Time Like the Present").

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